Innovation Design x ilovecreatives Designathon | 1st place! | nov 2023

Designathon

In November 2023, my friends and I (team name: the four bros — to everyone’s shock, actually four girls who are best bros) won 1st place in a designathon! Our prompt was to design an ilovecreatives T-shirt merch based on their brand and their beliefs. Because ilovecreatives is all about sharing education and learning, we wanted to portray something that communicated this brand, but with the funky ilovecreatives spin on it.

Education is all about growing and changing: Flowers

When thinking about learning, we thought about how knowledge waters our mind to grow and change. We decided to choose natures and flowers as our theme to exemplify education and ilovecreatives.

Ilovecreatives, as a brand

When you look to ilovecreatives - their social media, website, etc, you can see a common thread - not of a specific brand with harsh brand guidelines, but of ~ vibes ~ ! Our team scoured everything ilovecreatives and gathered that this is a brand that is authentic and true to their customers / users. They are unapologetically themselves - fun and playful and most importantly, CREATIVE!!

brainstorming

Based on our moodboard and the idea of nature & growth, we pulled out common themes and aesthetics that we saw. We began brainstorming by doing 10 minute sprints, trying to create as many variations of shirts as we could. From left to right Audrey’s, mine, Isabel’s, and Annika’s.

early feedback

Because we were able to get feedback and check-in with the judges, we took advantage of this opportunity and asked many questions to further our design. From these quick feedback sessions, we learned that we should focus on strong typography and simple images, like the pixelated flower. Not only was the feedback valuable because it helped guide our many thoughts, but it also provided a much-needed, fresh eye on our designs

final slidedeck

Results

After around 5-6 hours of working straight, we were finally able to present our hard work to the judges and our peers. Our judges decided that because we were able to implement ilovecreatives brand efficiently, while also adding our own spin on it, that we had truly understood ilovecreatives and were able to create a t-shirt that they would sell. They also said that we implemented their feedback really well and felt proud being able to see our progress from the beginning of the day. After we won, we stayed in contact with the founder of ilovecreatives, Puno Puno, about the brand selling our shirts (still in progress!!).

What we would do differently

Because our time was so constrained, looking back, there are a few things that I would do differently.

1. I would toy around with the back of the t-shirt more — when creating that layout, I had trouble fitting the image of the potted plant with the bigger text. As a solution, we made the copy longer to fill up the empty space. However, I think this makes the back of the shirt look slightly wonky and I would want to figure out a way to balance the image and the copy.

2. I would want to work on our prototypes and assets more - specifically our instagram prototypes. Because we were so cut for time, we weren’t able to make an instagram post that had everything we wanted. Given more time, I would have liked to spice it up a bit more - maybe make the marketing super interesting + a good caption.

However, overall, I think our team worked together really well. Despite this being our first time working together, we had a good sense of aesthetic and branding and collaborating on ideas. I really liked how we were able to build off of each others ideas so much that the t-shirt really became a product of all of our hard work.

10/10 experience would do again ;)